Her name is Al-AMIN MOHAMED AWAD AL- KARIM, Sana, a Sudanese lady . Her story started in 2005, she was only 17 yrs old and following her secondary education. While she was in the boarding school, her father married her to a 54 years old man who had asked her for marriage but she refused him for the simple cause that she wanted to continue her education.
A year after, marriage procedures took place under the father’s pressure. But husband was obliged to take her back to her family’s house in response to her persisting demand of divorce and in the absence of her response to him while spending honey moon. Her father interfered again, and forced her to follow her husband to his house in the north of Khartoum Bahari city. Where she spent four months in total rejection for this marriage. Seeing that she is not responding to him again, he took her back to her village ( Om Hijar Al- mikashfi) in Al-jazeera region, centre of Sudan. Two months after, he came back to Santa’s family, asking her to come back to his house, but again Sana insisted and refused his request and told him that she prefers death than living with him. He went away, but not without thinking about revenge.
A year after these incidents he started to prepare for his crime. He asked a merchant for a bottle of acid telling him that he needs it to clean a decaying support in his house, he came the next day asking for another bottle , proclaiming that the first bottle was full of holes and the remaining liquid wasn’t enough. The husband ceased the opportunity of the death of his uncle to get back to the village. On the second day of his arrival; he gave the bottle of acid to Sana’a brother , telling him that he is intending to have Sana as a wife so he went to marabout and he gave him this mihaya ( saintly water) so as to be splashed onto Sana face. The brother told him to do it by himself, the husband convinced him that the act should be done while she is sleeping about three o’clock in the morning. The brother ignoring the content of the bottle and the intention of the husband of deliberately defacing Sana, he threw the contents of a bottle of sulphuric acid into Sana face while Sana was sleeping between her parents in her village, not knowing that, by this simple act he is damaging his sister’s life for ever.
Sana told the journalist that « then after, I felt a hot burning liquid on my face, I woke up frightened, and saw my brother Mustafa standing next to me and my husband was running away. Five minutes after, I felt an unbearable pain, a pain like fire flames. I started screaming, while my mother beside me screaming too. Neighbours and all the people in the village came to see what had happened. My brother who was sleeping with our neighbours, came in and started to drench me with water. But the pain continued on. After that , my face had swollen , I lost my hair and I became like a monster as my eyes dried out and stopped moving,just like the stones. The colour of my faced turned into black . I lost sight and lost conscious. » she found herself grotesquely disfigured, and blind, by this easily accessible chemical weapon.
The perpetrator wasn’t punished or even charged. The legal case against him was filed, as some mediators came to her family and the father had pardoned the husband who paid a sum of 20 000 Sudanese pounds; (20,000 Sudanese Pound = 6,754.65 Euro); for a plastic surgery after his vitriolage. Worse, he got married to another girl while Sana is being treated in Egypt suffering from the consequences of his brutal barbaric attack.
Sana, is a real sad story, she needs to have plastic surgery, get provided with a proper medical treatment, counselling and rehabilitation all along with legal assistance.
Sana could no longer work or study, not only because of her disabilities, but because of the massive disgrace she was often perceived to have brought upon her family as well as she would have no chance of ever finding a husband and would remain an eternal burden on her family.
Sana needs us all. We must condemn this act, help her and bring husband to justice. We need to create a public awareness against this sort of crimes against women as early as possible to avoid its spread and generalisation as a punishment againt women as it’s the case in Pakistan, Bangaldesh, Afaghanistan, etc.